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Lumifer comments on Education as Entertainment and the Downfall of LessWrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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Your point about TED talks is valid, but I feel you're defining "learning" way too narrowly.
Imagine a 12-year-old city boy who spent a couple of summer months in his grandparents' cottage in the woods. Exploring forests, figuring our relationships with the local kids, fishing, swimming, etc. Did he learn much that can be expressed as "a one-sentence summary" and was directly applicable to his city life? No, not really. Did he learn much? Yes, he did.
I think that "diffused" learning which involves acquiring experience and understanding contexts is very important. But then, I'm a fox :-)
You are of course right about word usage, "learning" can various things, let's say:
1) inspiration and motivation,
2) fuzzy background knowledge and a right mindset,
3) explicit knowledge of a theoretical framework,
4) exploring the framework - filling gaps, building bridges, internalizing concepts,
5) training (theory, offline, field),
6) getting community support and help with problems,
7) organizing and simplification.
But then if I consider each of these separately, the current LessWrong seems lukewarm in all but 2), and I can easily point to (for me) more effective ways to accomplish the same goal for 1), 3), 4), 5) and 6):
1) read thousands of pages of Eliezer's braindump in a short span of time,
3) work through math and physics textbooks,
4) working together with people who are currently at a similar level, and are also learning about that particular topic (it does not matter if someone else did it before or not),
5) following individual people you can treat like your "jedi masters" (their methods and personalities need to resonate with you),
6) meeting folks in real life.
So I'm not denying 2) is important, but I think it rarely needs to be explicitly pursued, and also it comes with the danger of turning into a TED Talk-like disaster.
So maybe it would be a good idea to split/organise the content in LW depending on which part of "learning" its supposed to help with?
Your list is missing a very important thing: experience. After all that learning, you need to go out and actually do stuff. And in the process of doing you discover many things which your previous education skipped or didn't pay enough attention to.
Depends on the need, doesn't it?
It's easy to underestimate that need, too. Recognizing you don't understand a particular theorem is not hard, but realizing you need "fuzzy" background context is not trivial at all.
But it seems to me that a good way to get "fuzzy" background context is to bang your head against a variety of concrete problems (rather than explicitly being fuzzy). Example: you don't know how to approach a math problem, so you solve a lot simpler/related/example problems and it gives you a better "feel" and intuition about the objects involved. Then you come back to the original problem. I've seen this pattern a lot.
Can you give some examples of the opposite being true?
I agree. There is no need to be fuzzy "explicitly". My point is that a lot of important learning will be excluded by the requirement for specific one-sentence summaries. For example, banging your head against a bunch of concrete problems :-) One-sentence summary: "My head hurts" :-D
I am not sure what do you mean by "opposite" -- going from a more complex problem to simpler ones?
It's OK, since you agree on the "not being fuzzy explicitly" point, I don't have anything more to say about it.
Don't treat this "one sentence summary" thing too strictly - it's kind of a reflex/shorthand that is useful in many situations, but not all. I like it because it's simple enough that it's installable as a subconscious reaction.
I very much agree, but it seems to me that such learning as LW offers (or could offer) is much more of the explicit theoretically-summarizable kind than the implicit ineffable life-experience kind.
Fair point, though I'd like to add that even the "explicit kind" often needs a lot of context.